I am creating a site which connects to specified URLs, makes a MD5 checksum of the contents and then checks it against the database to see if it has been changed. The browser stops when the file should be opened and dies. The code all works except for this function. Can someone point out any obvious mistakes and/or make suggestions on how to improve it.

I don't see anything wrong but I may have missed something. I see you are using some table tags. Are you using Netscape as your browser? If so, then you need to "view source" when your browser "dies". If there is no closing </table> tag, Netscape won't display the table. This means that if your script encounters an error between <table> and </table> you won't see the error message. Use IE to look at it or use "view source" in Netscape to see if there is an error message.

Thanks. The table thing is just because it's all in a [badly written] function called during a table being built. I have since 'rearranged' it so that the hashing updates a field in the database to be displayed with the rest of the table later in the script.

The odd thing is that I have made a small script to open a URL (basically the same scipt up without the hashing) and then spit out $string which works fine. In the apache access log I see the GET <URL> okay, but not with the above. I'm at a loss...

I tried that - it seems that it's not getting that far, or at least it's not reporting an error. I'm running Apache 1.3.9 and PHP 3.0.11 on RH6. Are there any config files which could restrict me from opening other URLs?

Okay, problem solved. It was all my fault, a bad SQL query was trying to connect my machine (not on the net) to some external website. I *thought* my script could handle this...something for another day!